IIS Drupal Development - Part 1

I’m thinking of starting to develop my Bookshelf variants and Setting up development sites in my Windows System Natively. That would mean that instead of having a Virtual Box server, or a stack from Dev Desktop that I’d set everything up manually myself. And frankly, I think that alone might be interesting enough to try.

The thing you should know is that I would more than likely go with the stable setup that I’m aware of. Meaning setting up Internet Information Systems(IIS), MySQL, PHP, and related programs using the Windows 10 variants. That’s all from scratch. Which also means I must learn how to configure them all.

The Bookshelf Drupal Configuration setup for Drupal 8 is my next big build once we get all our old Fanbards Data figured out and imported. It will be much easier to create a migrate module once I have all of that done so that I can get my older content into the newer system. The issues with the current system are that we’re pulling from old databases that we still need to scrub data on.

For Bookshelf D8 I’ll be setting up an IIS web server. Now, if you have any flavor of Windows 7 on you can also make use of IIS and probably can find it in the available features of your operating system. There are more than a few tutorials online to help you install and setup IIS. We won’t go too in-depth into that setup here. Just find a good tutorial and follow the instructions. You’ll be fine there. Be sure that once you install IIS you install the URLRewrite Module. You’ll need this for clean URLS in Drupal.

Next thing you need to get working right is PHP. This is the language that Drupal is written in, so no PHP support, no Drupal. Get the most recent stable version of PHP and configure it as recommended by both the Drupal installation guide, and the PHP configuration guide. Once that is clear you will be okay to install extra support before or after you install the main Drupal project.

Now you’ll need a database program to create a storage point for your Drupal configuration. MySQL is the most common but there are others you can make use of. I personally prefer to keep with MySQL because it IS so widely supported, and you can be pretty certain you’ll find a MySQL install on any host you may make use of. There are other options, including MSSQL. These may require separate Drupal modules to make use of, however.

These are the bare minimum requirements to run a Drupal 8 install in IIS. You will want to install things like Symphony, Composer, PECL, and other development tools that you can find or want to use in Windows. You will also need to install your preferred PHP IDE for code development.

I like to think that building a stable Drupal page or community is not difficult for the average person. The fact is, that if you want to start creating your own communities or blogs, the tools are already there for you. You just need to start looking and you will find the right way. Do not think that just because you never had an IT certification from some place that you can’t do it.

The best part though about doing this? If you are just using PHP based development it will not matter if you later migrate to a Linux box for hosting. You may need some MINOR code tweaking, but since it's PHP you shouldn’t have to rewrite your entire script. Just change certain things that are Windows Standard like file paths to Linux Standard, and you might not even need to worry about that if it’s settings related.

Next post I’ll go into how you can maintain your builds and Drupal Projects in IIS and using the tools available.